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Topic: Resource Prospector (Read 81340 times)

Is there any prospect for some private entity to license the technology for Resource Prospector - like the way Bigelow licensed Transhab - to then further develop and build it under a CCDev-like contract?

Is there any prospect for some private entity to license the technology for Resource Prospector - like the way Bigelow licensed Transhab - to then further develop and build it under a CCDev-like contract?

I am pretty sure that it is, but it looks highly improbable to me. If you look back at the Google lecture the PI has said that he has found interest in the space mining community, but who is really willing to pay $200 million to get this to launch? Also, if NASA is willing to pony up this kind of money, they might just approve the new start as opposed to using a convoluted method. Bigelow was willing to invest something like $100-$150 million of his own money because of the Space Hotel angle, before CCDev appeared in the horizon. The most you can hope IMO is something like Dawn, where Orbital was willing to give up its profit in the cost plus contract because they wanted experience with an ion motor spacecraft, something lucrative today with geostationary satellites. Orbital never offered to take any cost, only to give up its profit.

Is there any prospect for some private entity to license the technology for Resource Prospector - like the way Bigelow licensed Transhab - to then further develop and build it under a CCDev-like contract?

The payload for Resource Prospector are fairly generic space science instruments, so I don't think there would be a lot to license. Also I don't see the point of going commercial. The customer for the data is the government, and the private sector has no experience building planetary rovers.

Cross posted from the Space Science thread. SpaceNews' article about LEAG has a couple of paragraphs about RP. The mission is approaching PDR. My understanding is approval of PDR means an official new start, and an official start is a political decision.

Looking to user commercial lander for RP if funded. They've been working on rover and its payload for few years now with their limited budget. Lander was always problem as a NASA one would need significant funding. That was why there were trying to get international partners to provide it. An offshelf commercial lander should be lot more affordable and more importantly know fixed price combined with launch.

He suggested that Blue Moon could be used initially to fly Resource Prospector, a NASA rover mission weighing a few hundred kilograms under development for launch in the early 2020s. NASA had initially been looking at international partners for landing the rover, but more recently project officials said a public-private partnership would be a more likely way to get to the moon.

In case the png is not up, it is a strong recommendation to go forward. Is that enough to push the mission to phase B? There does seem to a real plan now: Blue Origin has offered to use its lander to send Resource Prospector to the moon's surface and RP is experimental enough to not be deemed too critical to avoid this option. Still, just because a plausible path is visible it does not mean that it will be followed. In the end RP right now is where the ATHENA rover is compared to Spirit/Opportunity, lots of work needs to be done before we have flight hardware.

There does seem to a real plan now: Blue Origin has offered to use its lander to send Resource Prospector to the moon's surface...

Eh, how is that any more real than anything before ? BO is a company with a couple suborbital test flights under it's belt. A far cry from launching and landing anything on the Moon.

It's more realistic in that before they just prayed that a foreign partner will develop a lander, as opposed to now where BO intends to develop the lander, eventually. I agree, Blue Origin is nowhere near actually having the lander, but it still is better than the earlier plan of waiting for a foreign white knight

So, my understanding is that they did a bit more testing on the RP-15 testbed on earth and did more complicated mission planning, 4 traverses in the Northern and Southern polar region. They are moving towards phase B, sometime in the spring from what I understand.

I know that "perfect is the enemy of the good" and all that but wouldn't this mission be vastly more effective with an RTG for power and heat? Right now they are only designing for only a few days of surface operations until the first night. Using an RTG would allow them to operate for a much longer period and go deep inside the permanently shadowed regions (which are also the most interesting).

Long-term operation at low temperatures would be difficult but it maybe it could be tested on the ground in a thermal chamber?

Resource Prospector is first and foremost a mission on the cheap. If you read higher up this thread it seriously lacks redundancy to the point we might see a failure of the Mars Polar Lander/ Mars Climate Orbiter magnitude. Adding RTGs is very expensive, both in terms of complexity to the mission and in actual cost itself; see for example how Europa Clipper is going for solar rather than RTG. A high risk low cost mission like Resource Prospector really does not have that ability.